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bank closing. Uncle Seymour (Mother’s younger brother) had a Civil
Service job as a rural delivery postman. One Friday afternoon, after
work, he took his check to the Sugarhouse Bank near his home. He had
banked there for years. The teller, an old acquaintance, accepted his
check without hesitation. An hour later, the bank closed its doors, never
to reopen. You must realize what a personal catastrophe such an event
involves. On Saturday, Uncle Seymour read that the bank had closed.
Immediately, no one would accept his personal check. He had no access
to the money he had deposited. Under such circumstances, how do you
buy food for your family, pay the utility bills or buy gasoline for your
car? If you had debt for items you have purchased on a time payment
plan, how do you pay? Uncle Seymour had worked, and Aunt Audrey
had worked as a cashier at a nearby theater in the evening and they had
saved their money for years, but now it was frozen, totally unavailable
to them. About four years later the “Receiver” appointed to liquidate the
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Of course, one “bank failure,” as they were called, leads to oth-
ers. If the gossip in town says that a bank is teetering on failure, people
line up to withdraw their money. Some banks that were not in economic
trouble failed due to lack of liquidity. If depositors feel that the bank is
unable to supply the cash they want to withdraw, then a “run” on the
bank would occur and the bank would fail. A number of banks failed
during the Depression in Utah. The Church largely owned Zion’s Bank.
President Grant publicly stated that the Church would not allow Zion’s
Bank to fail.
During the Depression, most railroads in the United States
were wards of bankruptcy courts. The railroads only became solvent
with revenue derived in World War II. As the Depression developed,
mines and smelters closed because there was no economic market for
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Commodities produced in the United States such as wheat, corn, cotton
and wool fell disastrously in price. A chant “10¢ cotton, 20¢ wheat, how
in the hell can a poor man eat?” became the cry of producers of these

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